Baseball charts new course on seating

LA Times: Simple, ‘one size fits all’ ticket pricing has become a thing of the past as teams use the Internet and other avenues with an eye on increasing revenue. The Dodgers now sell 24 categories of seats.

Interesting article but doesn’t say anything new… :-)! Sure, baseball is slicing and dicing the stadiums into even finer pieces, but baseball has always been the worst about this. Back “in the day” when I handled both the Angels and the Dodgers as Ticketmaster clients (the Dodgers were what’s called an “allotment”, meaning that Ticketmaster only got X number of seats per game as the Dodgers have their own ticketing system that they run, or at least did… The Angels were a full fledged client that Ticketmaster “got” in the acquisition of select assets of Tickettron. They utilize all the Ticketmaster “goodness” :-)… ), and even back then, the Angels had something like 85 ticket types per game.

A “ticket type” is a way to have a different price for a ticket or a way to distinguish a ticket for tracking purposes (group tickets, AAA discount, Girl Scout discount, season seats, packages, etc.).

So clients like the Angels have been doing this for years. Another that is notorious for doing complex ticketing things, and having to track it not only locally, but replicating it nationwide for widespread tracking/marketing purposes, is Feld Entertainment… you know, the circus, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. They track every ticket sold on a nationwide/tourwide basis and have a gazillion different ticket types just for that purpose….